HYPERNOMA launched a three-year platform for unruly play

A media art festival in a former lemonade factory in Graz spent ten days on deepfakes, bot politics, and billionaire futurism—and closed by teaching beginners Unity. That whiplash is the highlight in the opening-night documentation that crossed my feed.

RESILIENT GLITCHES ran June 5-14 at Schaumbad – Freies Atelierhaus Graz, the artist-run house that has occupied the old factory since 2013. The curatorial claim: a glitch is an interruption you can organize around, not a technical error. The lineup mixed critical media art with activism—Zentrum für politische Schönheit, the machinima collective Total Refusal, ludic-research veteran Margarete Jahrmann, multimedia artist Babak Ahteshamipour, set designer David Szauder.

The part with legs is HYPERNOMA, a platform project on the artistic and social potential of digital play that launched inside the festival and is built to run three years. Its first game-culture weekend held free workshops on Unity, 2D game animation, and character design, plus the first Game Studio Meet Up Graz/Wien—Subotron, Bongfish, Causa Creations, Microbird Games, Game Dev. Graz—and Christof Ressi's sound lecture-performance Game Over. GameScenes has the full programme rundown.

Ten years ago glitch talk in games was mostly aesthetic—we were finding the beauty in machine glitches in 2016's Small Radios Big Televisions. Graz is making the harder pitch: that the bug, the unruly player, and the local scene are political resources, and that game culture curdles the moment it becomes "innovation" talk. A three-year commitment to that idea from an artist-run house, rather than a trade body, is worth watching. As always, I'm so jealous that we don't have more of this in the States.